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Mathematicians: Elections Flawed
Nader-licious writes "Science News Online reports: 'With recent reports of malfunctioning voter machines and uncounted votes during primaries in Florida, Maryland, and elsewhere, reformers are once again clamoring for extensive changes. But while attention is focused on these familiar irregularities, a much more serious problem is being neglected: the fundamental flaws of the voting procedure itself. Mathematics are shedding light on questions about how well different voting procedures capture the will of the voters.' The verdict: the U.S. system might be the worst of the lot."
US the worst? You don't need math to figure that out, you just need to look at the results.
I'm an Australian, and we use the "instant runoff" system described in the article. My view on it is that rather than putting the most popular candidate into office, it keeps the least popular candidates out of office.
There is a problem that the article neglected to mention - "how to vote" cards. Each candidate will generally recommend how they think people should vote - themselves first, naturally. The same sheep mentality that leads to 70% of the population voting for the same party every election leads to many religiously following these how to vote cards.
The end result is a heap of wheeling and dealing between candidates for these "directed preferences." It even becomes a stick in between elections that the minor parties can use to beat a major party with; in a marginal seat, having a minor party favour you over your primary opposition can be the difference between winning and losing.
If the Founders felt the common man or woman was too stupid to pick the President, they wouldn't have permitted a popular vote at all. The Founders did think the electorate was ill-equipped to select Senators, and made special provisions in the Constitution for Senators to be elected by State legislatures as opposed to the people.
If what you're saying was right, we'd see the President selected the same way. No, the Electoral College exists because of a concern they had in those long-ago days, a concern which is still very valid today: a concern that with pure direct election of the President, metropolitan areas would overwhelm rural interests and we'd wind up with a government "by the cities, of the cities" instead of one which represented the whole nation. If we had direct popular election of the Presidency, do you think the President would ever care about what concerns citizens in Montana had?
Take a look at the county-by-county election returns from the 2000 campaign. It's an absolute sea of red, except for a few small blotches of blue up and down the coastlines and other small blotches in the Midwest.
County-by-county, it was a Bush blowout. Not even close. We hadn't seen a county-by-county blowout like that since Reagan sent Mondale packing in '84.
It was only in terms of pure popular vote that Gore nudged ahead. But, as it turns out, pure popular vote doesn't matter in Presidential elections. It's pure electoral vote that matters.
Neither would be happy if the system would allow more than 2 parties to exist, so neither will ever agree to a substantial reform.
In my not humble at all opinion, the biggest problem is that our elections are from 7amto 7pm on TUESDAYS! They need to move the elections to Sundays and open the polls for 24 hours. As it is, alot of people are simply unable to vote because of work and commutes.
Derek Greene
What do you expect from a flawed society? Seriously.
Let's take the Presidential campaign of 2000. What choices did the people have. Let's take the two mainstream candidates first for example. Here's the story that was created by the media. You have the straight-talking cowboy with a heart of gold vs. the lying politician who can't even make up his mind on himself. And oh by the way, they will do exactly the same thing once they get in office. The people didn't stand a chance.
Nader:Not a viable option. Not to the fact that he's a third party, but the fact that Nader was more concerned with burying the Democrats than actually convincing people of things. (I'm a strong supporter of the Green platform, so cut that one off at the pass)
Buchanan:A viable option in my mind. People knew what he stood for. They just didn't like what he stood for.:)
Libertarian:The Libs. have the same problem as the Greens, in getting out an actual platform. With the Libertarians it's a bit more ingrained because the platform sometimes falls into hypocritical thought. (Drug Laws Bad, Property Laws Good!..BZZZT)
The problem in the US is not the voting systems. Well, the voting systems are a problem, but not quite in the way listed. The problem with US voting systems is that different areas use different voting systems with different margin of errors, which creates some differential in the actual vote count.
The problem in the US is the entertainment base of the media. They try to create a horse-race out of EVERYTHING. They equivicate the Democrats and the Republicans on everything, and pretty much ignore anything that would pretty much end one of the parties. For example, a massive coverage of the Pitt/Webster scandal right now would in essence make the election next Tuesday unwatchable. Why? The result would not be in question. It doesn't make for good TV.
News as entertainment. Sorry, I get enough of that from Jon Stewart. I want the rest of my news to be damn serious.
This is yet another in a long line of 'physical science rules misapplied to the social sciences.' A mathematical analysis designed to produce the guy who is everyone's best friend is all fine and good, but that's at best tangential to the real business of elections. Most people seem to have this vision that an election is a beauty pageant where a bunch of leaders are picked who then get to make all the decisions based on sweet reason. The real business of elections is to form mandate, consensus and acceptance.
Mandate: The winner points to a large number of votes as a justification for his / her agenda.
Consensus: The process of elections is designed to determine what kind of compromises among winners (remember that there are hundreds of elections at once) must be made to govern. Dozens of factions have to work together, and this is how the horse-trading happens that lets the hippies work with the union workers work with the trial lawyers.
Acceptance: OK, you disagree with the results of the elections, and you can't find other factions that you are willing to work with. You want to be ideologically pure and go your own way, and you don't have the popularity to make it on your own. You at very least have to accept the process that got you there. Acceptance is what keeps us from breaking into violence after the election.
OK, so how does our system fare?
Well, that article addresses the question, "what is the best way to measure my Mandate" to the exclusion of all else. In other words, it measures elections as if they were opinion polls. I'll come back to it.
In terms of Consensus, we have the best system in the world, which is why our government has only broken down into fighting once. In a parliamentary system, you get elected and then (as is happening in Israel) you form a coalition government by compromising with other parties to form a majority. So the people's will is measured, then a compromise is formed in a back room by elites.
In our system, the 'spoiler' factor that the article describes as a bad thing actually helps. In the end, you pretty much have to be in one of the two major parties, or your vote is useless. That means you have to compromise with the religiously orthodox, small businessmen, and engineers on one side (broadly) and lawyers, teachers, union officials, and students on the other (again, very broadly). You have to do the compromising, so you decide exactly what kind of deal to cut in the primaries. The two parties meanwhile have to be as inclusive of compatible points of view as possible. So our system rocks at building consensus. People who hate compromising, of course, love parliamentary systems, which are more entertaining in academia or on TV, but are notoriously unstable.
Finally, acceptance. Well, I think that our system has that, too, though it was strained in 2000 with the election fiasco, and events in NJ more recently.
Anyway, that's what the point of our election system is. Remember, even in physics, examining a system is reflexive: it changes what you're looking at. Our system isn't a measurement, it is a way to arrive at solutions that get the most popular viewpoints across, a good compromise if your faction didn't win the primary but won the general, and at least confidence in the process if you didn't even win the general. I'd say our system is the best I've seen, compared to either paper plans or real life.
The huge glaring flow in the US system is the fact that it is done in one single turn.
...
When it comes to naming individuals (e.g. presidents), most countries use a 2-turns system.
Usually, you can have as many runners as you want for the first round (16 at the last French election), then only the 2 highest scores are selected for the second round.
This means that all ideas can be represented at the election, and influence the big parties, without hindering their chances.In a 2-turn election, Ralph Nader would have been ejected at the first round, and the world's future would not depend on a man that watches Korea through closed binoculars !
Yet Nader's score would have prompted Al Gore to make small changes in his program in order to reap some of Nader's voters. Everyone would be happy: the most popular candidate wins, but the minority candidates can still express their views and actually influence government.
This system has one big default, however: it is so efficient that people tend to rely too much on it. E.g. in the French election, 99% of voters were absolutely certain that the 2nd round would bring the good old traditional Center-Left vs Center-Right showdown (Jospin-Chirac in that case), so many people didn't even care to vote. This is even more true for center-left voters, because their candidate (Lionel Jospin) was leading in the polls for the 2nd round.
And then they (we) saw Jean-Marie Le Pen's face on TV that night
Ever heard about those people who buy highly sophisticated cars with all security options and then start driving like devils out of their boxes, thinking that with such a safe car you don't need to be careful anymore ? One day or another, they end up bumping into a tree or a wall. The 2-turns direct voting system is a very safe car. But the French are notorious for being awful drivers.
Thomas Miconi
Who do not have enough time to read each candidate proposal,
only watch the 30 min. TV debate 1 month before the elections,
who do not understand 75% of every single phrase politician tell and
who honestly think that whoever is elected, it will be about the same?
I used to be idealistic, but I now think that government is just another business which happens to control my life.
"Democracy" sounds great... That's about it.
I'd rather be sailing...
A lot of these comments assume that the US system is flawed because that their views have no chance of being properly represented. The system isn't flawed because people aren't getting the people they want in office; the system works because the canidates that people fear are kept out of office.
Libertarians and Greens constantly complain that their views aren't reflected by either of the mainstream parties. For that matter, on many issues my own beliefs are closer to the Libertarians or the Greens and I personally haven't voted for a mainstream Presidential canidate since 92 [1]. However, the same complaints come from Lyndon LaRouche and the KKK. If only a small minority likes your views (and in the case of the libs and the greens that IS true [2]) and the vast majority of the country would be terrified by some of the changes you would enact, then you should not be elected under any system.
Think back on the 2000 election. Imagine now that instead of being a heavily contested race between two extremely similar middle of the road boring canidates, it was between David Duke and Ralph Nader. When the chads were being counted, there very well might have been violence instead of the, "I really hope the person I voted for wins, but if don't I'll be willing to grudingly accept it," attitude that we got. The vast majority of the population wasn't scared by either Gore or Bush[3]. This is proof that the system works for at least one definition of working.
What if you are one of the people who has the 2-5% views? In my opinion running canidates for office is a valid action, but the focus shouldn't be on somehow winning the race or even on getting matching funds. Instead focus on the attempt to get your views out. Slow dramatic change on the beliefs of the electoriate is much more frustrating than hoping your third party canidate can win somehow, but it's a fairer approach to the people who would disagree. One look at the drug legalization debate and the people willing to speak out about it now is proof that it can work. Our system[4] isn't fast about accepting change but remember. The same reasons why we have stupid copyright laws and pot continues to be illegal make it so no one could deport all Arabs on 9/12/01. It's not about getting our wishes; it's about not getting our fears. What's wrong with that?
[1] I used to live in Maryland. Now I live in Washington State. If the Democratic canidate doesn't carry both of those states easily, he or she is going to lose the election. In either case, I don't worry much about my own vote.
[2] That's disguised some by what I like to call the Fallacy of a Large Population. In a country of 260,000,000 people, 2% of that population is over 5 million people. It's easy to exist almost solely in a population that big. When all of your friends agree with you, you're much more likely to overrepresent the degree to which your views are believed in the population at large. The internet (which lets people converse based on beliefs or interests instead of geographical proximity) is making this much worse.
[3] If you're going to respond to this with a rant about how Bush is a facist and we should all fear him in the wake of 9/11, take the time to study real facists. I don't like aspects of the Patriot Bill either, but imagine what he could have railroaded through in the weeks following and be glad that boring middle of the road people win.
[4] Yes I'm being UScentric in this post. The article itself is about the US style of elections. Deal with it.
Sorry. On re-reading, you were considering the primaries to be the original round. But:
1) those aren't legally a part of the election
2) who can vote in them is restricted in most (if not all) states.
3) who can participate as a candidate is pre-selected by the party apparatus.
So they don't qualify either.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.